The expansion of computer networking, and both the hardware and software that support it, has allowed a proliferation of new services to become available to network users. And, as a better understanding of networking has evolved, so too have the opportunities that are the outgrowth of such technology as the InterNet and the World Wide Web. These technologies allow increased service capability by offering users a chance to participate in marketing and service ventures that they would not normally be able to access due to constraints from expense, equipment, or size.
Small businesses in particular can benefit from the ability to utilize the equipment of a centralized data center; equipment that the small business could never cost-justify if it had to be purchased directly. Direct mail or mass mailings are an example of how an excellent marketing tool can be cost-justified by firms that utilize the tool only once or twice a year. The limited usage does not justify the expense of maintaining the mailing, shipping or print equipment in-house; yet, through networks such as the InterNet and World Wide Web small businesses can create a mailing and then download the mailing parameters to a data center that can assemble the mailing and utilize efficient, high speed systems to produce a finished mail piece. Thus, the creation of the hybrid mail piece.
Hybrid mail is a creature of the evolution of technology and the mail stream. Where once a mail piece was created locally and then dropped into the closest available mailbox for eventual delivery to a remote location, now the entry points into the mail stream are virtually unlimited. One of the key elements to the importance hybrid mail is the ability of the user to get the finished mail piece to its intended destination not just more quickly, but also at a cheaper cost.
The prior art has been limited to the services available from print shops that produce the printed document, or fulfillment houses that assemble and mail documents, brochures, or direct mail pieces. Those few that have merged their services to form fulfillment services with printing and mailing capability, still required at the very best, that a document be downloaded for printing at the remote site from the network. But, the ability to define the parameters of the mailing, and include the parameters within the mailing data coming from the initiating site, simply do not exist. Thus, a disadvantage of the prior art is that there has not been an effective marriage of the various art forms required to adequately create a mailing and a corresponding address list, fully define the parameters of the mailing, remotely produce the mailing, and then prepare the mailing for delivery to the mail stream as a set of finished mail pieces.
Thus, an objective of the present invention is to define a mail piece remotely, download the defined mail piece to a terminal site, and then provide a cost effective means of producing and then delivering the finished mail piece to its ultimate destination.